Perhaps the only thing that changes more rapidly than technology in today's amped-up digital environment is the terminology used to describe that technology and its impact on consumers--and marketers. One recent example is the advent of the term "omnichannel" marketing, which many struggle to differentiate from another relatively recent term--"multichannel" marketing. Still, those who are most enmeshed in the field say there is a key distinction between the two, and it's one that will have an impact on marketers as they continue to seek ways of having a meaningful impact on the consumers they hope to engage. And, importantly, it's less about technology than it may seem.

IBM and Semagix Partner to Combat Money Laundering

IBM and Semagix have announced that they will pair IBM's WebFountain information discovery and analysis technology with Semagix's Customer Information and Risk Assessment System (CIRAS) to provide select financial services customers the means to identify suspicious transactions that could indicate illegal money laundering activity.

With the passage of Section 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act, financial institutions can be required by law to assess the risk that high-transaction customers may be laundering money. The information necessary to determine this does not reside in structured databases; rather, the most current information usually sits in the pages of unstructured information on the Web, as well as within other crucial information sources. WebFountain, IBM's Web-scale business intelligence platform, is designed to provide insight by uncovering relationships, patterns, and trends. This technology collects and analyzes pages of structured and unstructured data from a variety of public information sources to help financial services companies quickly assess potential money-laundering risks.

Integrated with the WebFountain platform, the Semagix CIRAS application allows for Web-wide queries to be linked to other disparate sources of information. Based on unstructured data mining and semantic metadata technologies, the IBM-Semagix solution is intended to enable risk and compliance teams to cost-effectively respond to changes in legislation that influence anti-money laundering initiatives. This solution is positioned to complement a number of IBM's existing independent software vendor alliances with expertise in risk and anti-money laundering, such as Searchspace, Mantas, and SAS.